About “Small Red Boy”

In this moving song, Sean Bonnette imagines himself having a symbiotic encounter with his child self — whom he has compared to the figure of Cody in the album’s opening track. He fantasises giving himself a fulfilling, loving, perfect childhood. While he says he “[doesn’t] think [he] had a particularly super, super awful childhood,” putting himself in the situation of the child-rearer is a way for him to understand and make peace with the parental mistakes that might have hurt him during his real childhood.

Allow yourself to empathize with the people of your past—when you become the age that they were, it helps let go of a lot. […] When I’m trying to figure out the things holding me back in my life these days, looking back is a good place to start. — Bonnette to Paste Magazine, August 2016

Thanks to this approach, Bonnette becomes able to fully embrace his present and future, to deal with his neuroses and his trauma, and to transform himself into the positive and driving force that he needs to get through life as he bridges 30 years old.

“The imagery in the song is the devil coming out of yourself", he says later in the interview. Here, for Bonnette, learning to understand the demons that shaped you is an essential step to fully loving yourself.